In their pompous gear the bishops of the Church of England met in London last week to condemn the anti-Jewish policies of Adolf Hitler.
“Continuance of the present modes of persecution must seriously affect the good-will with which the people of Britain desire to regard the German nation,” warned the Archbishop of Canterbury, before popping out of the Church Assembly to christen the six-week-old son of the Duke of Kent.
“I am one who has a profound admiration for Germany,” cried the Bishop of Chichester. “Surely the great masses of the German people themselves abhor the policy of persecution!”
“I had hoped the ghetto had passed from the world forever,” the Bishop of Southwark boomed, “but today if the position of Jews cannot be compared to that of slaves in Germany it can be compared to that of helots! We have heard Goebbels describe the Jews as vermin. It is not good for any nation to regard any human whatever as vermin. It is worse for the nation . . . than for the persons they are urged to treat this way!”
“Olympic games are to be held in Berlin next year and until they are over the Government wishes to conciliate public opinion,” said the Bishop of Gloucester. “Afterward an effort will be made, it is said, to sweep away all church organizations in Germany.”
Finally all bishops present and the general Anglican Assembly were worked up to loud and prolonged cheering by the Bishop of Durham. “Jews are just as mixed a race as the Germans; they could hardly be more!” cried this Lord Spiritual. “This nonsense about ‘race’—as if there were some poison in the ancestry of Judaism which must be guarded against— is sheer hallucination. It is preposterous! . . . We loathe and detest this attitude obtaining in Germany and protest!”
In Germany meanwhile Adolf Hitler was under covert criticism in high Nazi Party circles which consider his new Semite-repressing decrees (TIME, Nov. 25) too moderate. In the Realmleader’s defense his close friends explained that at a lively Cabinet meeting, with the German “Old Guard” of Schacht, von Neurath & von
Blomberg supporting the decrees in their present form, Herr Hitler demanded that they be sent back for redrafting. This was done by Dr. Gerhard Wagner, head of the German Physicians’ Association, who came back with a draft recommending that “all who had ever been intimate with Jews should be counted in with Jews” and as such feel the full weight of the decrees. This draft Adolf Hitler approved but the Army, represented by War Minister General Werner von Blomberg, fought desperately against it, since a good many swank Prussian officers have taken Jewish wives to enable themselves to go on living in the style to which a Prussian officer is accustomed. At length, after a second excited Cabinet scene, Catholic Hitler threw up his hands and, with the German Old Guard concurring, decreed the law in its original form, debasing Jews to the level of criminals and imbeciles in Germany, but going easy on part-Jews.
Convinced that there is about the Jew something of a noxious but elusive character, something deeper even than “blood and race,” the Nazi leader of Franconia, famed Julius Streicher, Boss of Nürnberg and pal of Adolph Hitler, came out with a ringing demand: “The new laws for the protection of German racial purity must be extended to dolls and wax figures. It is an insult to German womanhood that Jewish children should play with dolls having German faces. The Jews must be forced to manufacture dolls with definitely
Hebraic features for Jewish children and similar Hebraic figures for showing off clothes in the windows of Jewish shops.” Next day Jews received another blow from Germans as distinguished from Nazis. Ousted from their eight stock exchanges were all Jewish floor brokers by order of the German Old Guard’s Reichsbank President Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.
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